Where's My Water?

Role:Lead Artist

App Description: Swampy the Alligator lives in the sewers under the city. He’s a little different from the other alligators – he’s curious, friendly, and loves taking a nice long shower after a hard day at work. But there’s trouble with the pipes and Swampy needs your help getting water to his shower!

Help Swampy by guiding water to his broken shower. Each level is a challenging physics-based puzzle with amazing life-like mechanics. Cut through dirt to guide fresh water, dirty water, toxic water, steam, and ooze through increasingly challenging scenarios! Every drop counts!

We developed a number of concepts for the game before it became a story about helping an alligator shower.

Early Development.

Once we had the idea of an alligator who needed water for a shower, I worked on concepts for what his world could look like. Sewers, alligators and dirt are really unappealing things. The challenge was to represent this world in a playful way, I started by designing the dirt like it was cookie dough or layers of cake. (right)

Mechanic Concepts (Dirty Water - left , Algae-right )

Once we had a general visual direction, I focused on what the various mechanics could look like. When designing for mobile platforms I restrict myself to the screen dimensions of common phones. This forces me to think about the readability of each design.

Swampy's Design Evolution

The design of Swampy was truly a team effort, about 4 artists contributed designs. One of our Art Directors, Joe Vance, kicked the process off with his exploration. Mike Kunkel ultimately produced the design we all rallied behind. It was my task to finalize his design and synch it with the gameplay look and feel. I created his color scheme and refined the design to give him more of a soft appealing cuteness to match his naive personality.

Swampy's Rubber Ducky.

A common mobile game troupe is the collection of "stars" that denote your degrees of success for each level. We wanted our world to feel more cohesive so we decided to theme are "stars" as shower items, settling on just rubber ducks. This gave us an opportunity to create a pet/companion for Swampy in the larger narrative as well. I designed the duck and as the player progresses through the game they get to see him dressed up in various outfits. The duck designed was also riffed on for the "Cranky" duck ( who likes dirty water) and the "Steam" duck ( who is filled with steam).

Swampy's story was told through illustrations that preceded each level. Their format was long and the game camera would pan over them. They had to be designed to have areas of focus that would read in the portrait orientation of a phone.

Swampy leads the alligator gang on many "human-like" adventures.

The process for creating a story moment would begin with a team brainstorm. Then the talented layout and storyboard artist Shane Zalvin would illustrate the scene.

Once the composition was finished I would digitally ink all the line work. I would separate the background and foreground onto different layers.

Final Color

Once the inks were in place we would add color and texture to the image. With a busy image like this I would give the background a slight blur to make sure the characters stood out better.

I developed this process and painted most of the original story moments. I then taught the process to artists as they joined the team so they could carry on this work.

Gameplay Assets

I designed the visual style of the game and most of the first round assets.

My work on the game also included designing the final logo and various promo images for the game. Like the one above.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

Role:Concept Artist, Illustrator

Game Description: Enter a macabre and comical silent world filled with mischief, time travel and delicious pie.

Having been cursed by an evil mysterious and sentient pie, P.B. Winterbottom has the ability to manipulate time and replicate himself into multiple clones. Help him in an attempt to gather pies across time and space!

The player may record an action and a clone will repeat that action, serving as a platform, pie-fetcher, or other puzzle-solving device.

Poster Art for the first level pack. Accepted into the 2010 "Into the Pixel" Art show

Each Pack of levels featured a new poster highlighting the new mechanics or location introduced(depending on which made a stronger image. The above image was for a bonus level where the goal was to grab as many pies as possible.

The above poster was for a series of levels that took place in the sewers of Winterbottom's city. The inspiration behind their designs were vintage cabaret posters, Russian Avant-garde film posters, Saul Bass.

Winterbottoms Redesign

The game began as a college project spearheaded by the co founders of the studio "The Odd Gentlemen". My first job on the game was to redesign the main character so he had a more polished look for a premium game.

Supporting Characters

I designed a number of other characters for the game. They didn't make it into the final levels, but they were used in the illustrated story moments between levels.

The story of P.B. Winterbottom was told between levels with these illustrations. A clever poem was superimposed of these drawings that described winterbottoms exploits. When all was said and done I produced over 60 of these drawings.

I also designed the main logo, as well as the logo for the company.

The mischievous pie thief will stop at nothing in the pursuit of pie.

P.B. messes with the the wrong pie, who curses him to be unstuck in time.

City Concept

City 2D/3D concepts

Working with the 3D team I developed the process we would use to create the backgrounds in the game. We would model out various buildings, then instead of texturing them we would bring them into photoshop and paint texture and lighting. This allowed us to get the German Expressionist look we were going for.

Clocktower Design

Clocktower Painting

DodoPop

Role:Art Director

App Description: MATCH & COLLECT gumballs on an island-hopping puzzle adventure and help Crash the dodo bird fly his way home! Dodo birds can’t fly…until now! Gumballs are raining from the sky and have piled up everywhere. Tap groups of matching colors to feed them to Crash. With enough gumballs, Crash can blow a bubble big enough to carry him to the next island, and closer to home!

I was not attached to this project at the beginning, but was asked to join after their first pre-production phase. A solid prototype of the color matching mechanic existed but the studio wanted a stronger theme. On the left is the original circus theme, which didn't have a main character at it's core.

I set about developing concepts that turned the game items into something that a character might collect ( Like pearls for an octopus sea captain in the middle, or gems for a mole miner on the right)

Gumballs

Although we tried out a number of ideas, coworkers kept commenting that our game looked like a bunch of gumballs in a jar. For our game to work correctly the shapes of each colored item had to be identical, however we chose to distinguish each by adding a flavor icon.

Dodo Concepts

Once we settled on gumballs we tried to imagine who would need them. One of the artists on our team, Aaron Berchild, drew up a funny sketch of a dodo bird blowing a gum-ball so big it lifted him off the ground. Dodo's couldn't fly, so we imagined a wrold where one of them got really inventive, and the player could help them out by collecting more gumballs.

Character Refinement

We combined our favorite elements from the previous round into this set of designs.

Getting Closer

However our last round wasn't appealing enough. Also the character looked like an adult, and we wanted the dodo to feel like a child so that the player felt a stronger motivation to help them. We rounded out many elements of his design ( like his beak) and gave him more childlike proportions ( big head and feet etc...)

Final Character

Environment Design

Each level of the game would pull from a different layout. These level "jars" all had unique organic shapes that would grab the gumballs in different ways. We knew we wanted an island setting and initially set out to design a Dr. Suess style world of rolling cliffs.

However that approach made the world feel a little off, so we then went for a more natural approach ( left). That also didn't feel quite right either. We were trying to create an organic space in a composition that was specifically laid out by a designer.

So we changed our approach and represented each "jar" as a structure made of loose stones implying that it was also specifically designed, but in the narrative world of the game. This worked well, and the more neutral color of the stones brought more focus to what was important, our colorful gumballs

Gameplay Screenshots

In the game various events trigger a celebratory visit from the dodo.

Intro Cinematic

My team and I worked in collaboration with Gold Tooth Creative on an intro movie to introduce players to the world. We created the story beats in house and reached out to them to create the intro. What they delivered was beyond what we originally imagined. I provided art direction to the team throughout development.

The Story: In our game Crash is a dodo bird living on a hidden island where gumballs rain from the sky.

One day crash discovers by accident that he can blow a huge gum balloon that lifts him off the ground. He is then able to do what he has always dreamed...fly!

However a huge gust of wind carries him far away to another island. In the game it is the players mission to help him collect more gumballs so he can get home.

This game also continued my tradition of designing the logos for our original IP.

Where's My Perry

Role:Lead Artist

App Description: Agent P is trapped in the tubes! Power-up the hydro-generators to help our fedora-wearing spy get back to the business of saving the world!

Join Agent P in the next addicting physics-based puzzler from the creators of Where’s My Water?

Help Agent P get to headquarters for mission briefing by guiding water or steam to power his secret transportation tubes! Transform water in cool forms like ice, steam and solids to solve all sorts of mind-bending puzzles! Every drop counts when it’s SPY TIME!

Concept for how to Theme the "Where's My Water?" mechanics using the art style from "Phineas and Ferb"

Stack Rabbit

Role:Lead Artist

App Description:

Hop, stack, and match veggies through 65 head-scratching levels!

Play as Ben the Rabbit on living puzzles, where veggies grow back as you match them. Challenge yourself to create recipes, match stacks and get all the veggies! Jump, spring and dive your way through puzzles. Avoid Max the guard dog in fast-paced chase levels!

Early Prototype

The original prototype's use of primitive shapes inspired the cube style art direction of the game.

Early look and feel exploration for the cube aesthetic of the world.

Cube texture and style explorations.

Ben the Rabbit

Max the guard dog

Gameplay Screen Concept

We went through many rounds of concepts for what the game board could look like. This concept felt like it had the right blend of readability of the veggies as well as showing off the style of the world.

Final gameplay Screenshot

Ben's Treehouse Concept.

Concept for Ben's forest hideout.

Illustrations

Shy Guy

Thirsty Woods

Imaginary Friends

Kill Screen T-Shirt Design

Valentines Day

Subtle

Insomnia

Portraits

All portraits created using watercolor.

Portrait of Bill Murray.

Aric

Jansen

Laurel

Miguel

Jay

Inktober

In 2014 I participated in Inktober an online initiative led by the amazing artist Jake Parker. Read more about it here!

I wanted to have a focus for my ink drawing efforts, so I decided to pull the trigger on a project I had wanted to tackle for a long time. I decided to illustrate the very first "The Legend of Zelda" game as though it were a storybook. I spent many weekends playing and replaying the game as a kid, and it has long been my favorite game of all time. This project is a little love letter to the game and the whole Zelda series.

My plan is to plot out the story in the same order in which you would finish the game. I am redesigng all the characters based only on their original 8-Bit sprites and what I thought they looked like in my head when I was a kid. I didn't make it all the way to the end, but I am continuing the story in this years 2015 Inktober challenge.

All the drawings are made using a sable brush and Ink, in a 9in x 9in "Super Deluxe" Aquabee Sketchbook.